Fostering a Culture of Excellence is a Bumpy Ride

DESCRIPTION

After 20 years of practicing Lean, Argus continues to learn how to develop and support problem solvers to help us navigate towards our True North of Enterprise Excellence. Perhaps our greatest lessons learned are those around fostering a culture to support a sustainable lean journey.

In this presentation, the audience will gain insights to guide strategies and tactics around the importance of developing people to understand lean thinking, not just lean practice. Argus’s lean journey began in 2005 with what now can best be described as an “industrial engineering” approach to lean, otherwise known as a focus on the tools.

In late 2013, we ate some humble pie and pulled the Andon on our lean journey due to a stall in adoption. It was time to do some serious reflection and PDCA on our approach to implementing lean. In 2015, we began to deploy the reset, lean 2.0 if you will, with a focus on culture.

What was previously a “factory floor” only focus, has now grown to include everyone touching our value streams, meaning, every team member from rack-hand to CEO. We are seeing business success by developing a customer centric mindset through process ownership supported by lean thinking and practice.

Foundational to this lean reset is understanding and living daily into our shared values: YOU MATTER because you are part of ONE TEAM, we OWN IT because we share a PASSION FOR EXCELLENCE

Rating: Intermediate

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Argus is an employee-owned (ESOP), medium-sized manufacturer headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada since 1958. Argus’s capabilities include two fully equipped manufacturing facilities with 113 machining assets and a product assembly plant. From concept to implementation, our skilled engineering, production, and customer service team members deliver world-class quality machined parts, pipeline products, and threading solutions to various industries across the globe.

For more detailed information, please visit our website: www.argusinnovates.com

PRESENTERS

Marc Kuzik

, CI Manager

, Argus

Marc Kuzik has 18 years of experience in implementing and teaching lean principles in manufacturing and office environments. For the past 10 years, his role has been architecting Argus’s lean journey that fosters a mindset and culture of excellence to drive business performance. He holds a BSc and MSc in Engineering and is a certified Master Blackbelt Lean-Agile coach. Marc sits on the AME’s National Board of Directors and leads the AME’s Champions Club